First Look: Wildfire Worlds

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Wildfire Worlds is a “cute paper toy society” with riots. We sent Brendan to take a look.

The London riots caught us all by surprise. Whether or not they should have done is a question best left to David Dimbleby and his bumbling corral of inquisitors. But one thing I do remember thinking during the unrest, between feverishly refreshing Twitter and peeping at the BBC out of the corner of my eye, is this: someone should make a game about rioting? Preferably viewed from the top-down, so you can see the chaos spread. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Enter Dot Product, a newly formed independent studio of six people based in Soho, who had the exact same thought and began work on Wildfire Worlds. It is described by the developer as “the most firm yet absorbent riot simulator you could ever dunk.”

Wildfire Worlds is a game which, at first glance, looks like a cuddly pastiche of SimCity. Almost everything in the world, from the skyscrapers to the tiny people to the adorable double decker buses, is made from papercraft models. But underneath the cutesy appearance lies a dark heart of discontent. While the citizens of a papery London go about their day – taking the tube to work, doing their shopping, playing in the park to relax – the player can at any moment choose to pop down a single angry activist, who will go on to ‘convert’ others to his cause, eventually spreading destruction and violence all across the city.

It’s a simple idea that reminds me of Urban Dead creator Kevan’s original Zombie Infection Simulation and indeed the game will feature the option to have ‘zombies’ instead of rioters. In fact, the whole point of the game seems to be about customising the precise scenario you want to simulate. There are even plans to include less destructive protestors, says director James Boty.

“I’d like a war torn level,” he says. “Like Baghdad now. And maybe literacy’s gotta break out? And you’ve got to spread peace. And how many guards have you got to stand there and get shot by, before they start to grow a conscience? That kind of modelling, at the end of the day it’s all about the spread of ideas and systems that work in a coherent fashion.”

At this point in development, it’s clear that they’re going for a simulate-y feel for the game. Right now the interaction amounts to placing down activists and herding them with the mouse, like a little mob, so they can pick up and ‘infect’ more people with their dangerous ideas.

“We’re not making a typical ‘Rock Paper Shotgun’ game in terms of interaction,” admits James. “We want it to be something that you want to watch. One of the original ideas was ‘I wanna be a disease and I want to infect the whole world.’ And various people have done that on global levels, like Pandemic but the thing is that it’s not at this level. It’s the model train set thing. We’ve all had that thing where you wanna fuck up your toys as a kid. So this is about pitching it at the level where most people are going to enjoy but at the same time making the systems robust. It’d be very east to gamify. To turn it into a twin stick shooter or a racing game or an RTS but we’re trying to pitch it at a different level. So that it’s deep but it’s ‘casual-deep’”.
“It’s a toy,” interjects Michael Micahel, the studio’s tautonymous designer.

“Yeah,” says James. “It’s a complicated toy would be the best way to describe it.”

Just how complicated this toy will become is still being decided. The team already has a day and night cycle, including London’s dreaded rush hour which can be taken advantage of for maximum infection rates.

Emergency services also do their thing as the day wears on. I’m shown a vandal spray-painting an anarchy sign on the wall. He is soon spotted by a pair of bobbies, who roll up all ‘ello ello’ style. The rascal clocks the cops and runs off down the tube to escape, much to the surprise of the two developers. He was supposed to get arrested, they tell me. Later, another vandal shows up and is promptly thrown into a police van.

These kinds of details seem atmospheric, rather than game-altering. But there is more in the works. For instance, electricity is already functional. Should the rioters destroy a power station, as they do in another video I’m shown, a whole chunk of the city will lose power, knocking out streetlights and giving the activists a bonus at night time.

“When there’s no light it makes people freak out and scatter-dash,” adds Michael. “Which in theory makes them easier to corner and take over. So, we’ll have substations around the city like this. But then we’ll have the main station which might take out the whole city – and that would be heavily protected, obviously.”

I spot the papercraft building he is talking about in the north of the city, with some smoke rising from its chimneys. It bears a lovable resemblance to Battersea power station. Somewhere on the map a grenade is thrown into a body of protestors, spraying blood everywhere.

“Obviously, what we’ve done here is we’ve turned the police brutality up to full,” says James. “Just to see what happens, you know… They’re shooting at these guys now. I think they’re mostly dead.”

How violent or watchful the police are is just one of the adjustable parameters the team is going to include. Before you begin playing you can alter a large number of sliders that will determine how the different systems in the game work. Basic things like the level of activist aggression or the policemen’s range of sight will be included. But, potentially, as they add more and more layers of detail to the game world, lots more variables will become available. The idea is that you set everything up, like a column of dominoes. Then, you flick. The same design idea is used in Cliffski’s Gratuitous Space Battles – you arrange everything, tinker with the settings, then let destruction loose. At which point, your input is very limited. But the enjoyment comes from watching the ensuing bedlam.

Which makes the London riots almost the perfect setting, considering how it turned so many of us into voyeurs de violence.

“The mentality of a mob,” says James. “We’re modelling that. It’s got this energy and momentum of its own that’s quite terrifying but that’s addictive to see if you’re not in there. It’s like watching the parades. There’s that tension of ‘it’s not gonna kick off… but is it gonna kick off?’ It becomes this terrible spectator sport. The London riots were very addictive. Like, that guys shop in Croydon. You know that shop, you’ve seen that shop. And there’s a little bit of you going: ‘Oh, it’s terrible about that guy’s shop.’ But there’s a little bit of you thinking: ‘Croydon deserves to be burnt down. It’s a shithole. It’s been a shithole for thirty years. It needs to be burnt down. We need to start again.’ You know it’s wrong to think that, but…”

The phrase “we need to start again” sticks out. The riots of Wildfire Worlds turn out to be a purge of sorts. Not a purge of class, a la the French Revolution or anything dull like that. But a purge of humanity, in the most apocalyptic manner. After everything has been destroyed and all the paper humans are long gone, the city lies in ruins. Then, after a time, trees and plants begin to grow on the bloodstains. Roads break up and are replaced by grasslands. Little papercraft deer and squirrels appear and eat the vegetation.

“And this is where it gets maybe a little bit controversial,” says James. “I want to bring in… Dinosaurs.”

Dinosaurs!

“And then the dinosaurs shit bankers.”

Bankers!

“And the bankers attract investment and people. The people start chopping down trees and then you’re back to square one again. So it builds itself.”

“We want it to be beautiful,” says Michael. “Birds singing, trees – only to get destroyed again.”

So the plan is that game will run in a loop, which neatly hops the final hurdle of the infection simulation like Pandemic, where the player is left with a pile of corpses and nothing to do with them except count the bodies and apply a multiplier – a literal dead end. Would a cyclical simulation remove that sense of finality? Essentially, the endgame would become ‘whenever you get bored.’
On the other hand, if you leave the world unaffected – if you stay your hand and don’t plant down any activists – the human race will just keep going, to become diagnosed with a citywide case of obesity.

“People will get fatter, more advertising will happen, more pollution builds up, the police become more fascistic. They go from batons to pistols to machine guns to grenades… So basically you’ve got a trade off. The longer you wait to pick your moment, the harder it gets to take on the world. Because obviously the police are getting tough.”

But because the population would presumably be going up in the meantime, the team needed a reason to level this out, so that there weren’t too many characters on screen at once. Michael came up with the solution.

“As the world gets more fascistic, and they take away the trees and reduce the parks, people get more depressed and they commit suicide… If you watch this little building here you might see somebody jumping out their window.”

For a few seconds nothing happens at the house I’m looking at. Then some activists appear and start destroying the building from the outside. Sure enough, a couple of papery citizens throw themselves from the upstairs windows. Not out of despair – but to escape the angry mob.

“They jumped out but they didn’t die,” observes Michael. “I suppose it’s because they’re terraced houses. If this was an office building… I can’t imagine.”

Just how much more ambitious a simulation of civil unrest Wildfire Worlds might get, I can only guess. But I know the team aren’t confining themselves to London, with Damascus and the Vatican touted as two possible settings. They’ve still got a lot of work to do by their own admission. Multiplayer is one avenue not fully developed and they’ve yet to decide whether they want to include some kind of scoring system. Would the game benefit from showing the player the stats on exactly how rabidly their citizens turned on each other? Who knows. Perhaps more importantly, a map editor is also on the to-do list.

But first, they need some feedback. So they’re planning to release a playable alpha version and go from there.

“We need people to really tell us what they think,” says James. “We need eyeballs. We need people to see it and say, ‘it doesn’t work’ or ‘it doesn’t do this’ or ‘where is it going?’ That’s very much my focus. We’re gonna build something and then we’re gonna listen.”

So, I guess you have to ask yourself a question. Is this a riot you want to be a part of? Or are you happy to just sit and watch? Either way, we know it’s coming. Don’t let it catch you by surprise.

Societies are presumed to tend to fascism in the absence of protesters -> civil unrest -> rioting? That’s… debatable.

If this were “just a game” that wouldn’t matter as much. But to simulate some dynamic system is to try to abstract the crucial functional elements of that system so that the whole thing works like reality works. A satisfying simulation tries to insure that hardcoded assumptions match objective reality — otherwise it’s not so much a simulation as a megaphone.

So is “fascism increases as protesting decreases” another variable that players can control? Or is it a developer assumption that has no user-frobbable slider (and may be the message, so that user control would be unwanted)?

i think your taking the simplified game mechanics a little to seriously

if we wanted to measure the various correlations between protests and government type we’d be playing a paradox grand strategy game.

“The Sims” is a popular “life simulator.” But we don’t sit around criticizing “well… this game assumes that reading a book is perceived as fun, thereby discrediting itself as a Sim, and should thus not be called the Sims”

When it got to dinosaurs shit bankers I took it all to be an ideological statement from the devs rather than a simulation of reality. Not that there’s a problem in it, it is interesting someone does that actually.

I think Margaret Thatcher is webbed up against the roof of a huge cavern beneath the houses of parliament like the queen in ‘Aliens’, her swollen thorax pumping out egg after egg from which bankers emerge fully formed clutching briefcases and scuttle out into the world under the direction of her pheromone induced hive mind.

“Satisfying” is the wrong word for what you’re describing, because that’s a subjective statement that I might disagree with. “Believable” is closer, because we can enter real-world data into the system and see how close the simulation comes to pinpoint accuracy.

I got the sense that they weren’t going for exacting realism when they started talking about dinosaurs shitting out bankers, so I’m not sure your complaint is the most valid one. If you prefer a realistic simulation, fair enough, but that doesn’t suggest to me that subjective simulation for the purpose of entertainment should be frowned upon. I mean, if they were making this for the purpose of educating people about riots, I’d agree with you, but they themselves describe it as a toy. One assumes entertainment is the primary concern. As long as the simulation is internally consistent, that doesn’t seem particularly devilish.

You said it really well, but if someone is launching into the tired criticism of realism in games, despite a lack of context or relevance, then they probably aren’t going to be persuaded by things like logic or perspective. Particularly, perspective, as anyone with a shred of it wouldn’t be making said complaints in the first place.

Of course power-hungry leaders will always try to maximize their control over society if left unchecked. A whole lot of our anti-terrorism, austerity or anti-internet measures show clear fascist tendencies in that regard. Fascism is no binary state. And it isn’t something that can be reduced to police behaviour, but since that’s about the only component of government that is modeled in the game, I think it’s fair to map the spread of fascism onto it.

I don’t believe riots are an effective way to keep such tendencies in check, mind you. They’re rather beneficial to new homeland security bullshit actually.

I thought that was pretty silly too, that those are mentioned as the only end-game options. Not because I begrudge them the right to simplify, but because it sounded (who can tell from an interview transcript though?) like it was intended to be a meaningful point made? Maybe?

Then I realized that it cuts both ways, and I was okay again. Yes, perhaps this game will make the odd assumption “Every long-lived civilization tends toward a fascist police state.” But it also makes the odd assumption, “Social activists tend to be violent burners of worlds capable of swarming over contented citizens and assimilating them.”

Which would suggest that the best way to have a happy and healthy civilization that lasts forever is to make sure that there are *equal parts* anarchy and order, and that if only all the policemen and looters would kill each other, the resulting chaos would clear just enough space for a nice park or two. =P

The whole “Ain’t go no trees, I’ma kill myself” population sink also tipped me off that they’re okay with fudging a few social dynamics for the sake of making a working toy. =P

Rather strange, isn’t it? The portrayal of protestors as mindless hooligans seems to show them as villains in the creators’ minds, but then the fact that a lack of protests leads unerringly towards a consumerist, fascist society would seem to suggest they find such protests absolutely necessary. It would appear that this is a cynical attempt to conceal any authorial attempt and thus appeal to as much people as possible if I didn’t have a much stronger feeling that the game doesn’t show any deeper political inclinations simply because the authors have a wholly mathematical interest in the whole affair and have no inclinations whatsoever, not any more than the people who gather around a beached whale to watch it be carried back to the ocean or drown under its on weight have an interest in marine biology.

I really love the art style..infact I prefer this style for a sim city like game..but one with possible riots or zombie outbreaks..or terrorists..I’d like to be able to train up the police..something like the sweeny..have bank robberies and car chases and shoot outs etc etc..and gangs and gang wars and all manner or crazy things going on..I just want to create it..similar to Sim City bit have seedy underworld goings on and possible financial ruin and pretty much every and any disaster may happen and you can watch a whole story play out…it be fully open world and non scripted. Just a few restrictions to stop everything happening all at once..but you never know what may happen and pray you’ve got enough police or your new flying squad are all trained up and th head is upto the job..or you’ve got a decent firebrigade and have invested well in equipment..all these things..but really you watch a whole story unfold in your paper city. A game that end sup telling it’s own story..

The art style is so far removed from realism I can’t see the problem..I mean it’s you wouldn’t be offended by Tom and Jerry violence for instance…it’s paper craft riots not real life riots..it’s fiction..fantasy..I see no problem here with the subject matter at all…

The only games I have or would have issues with are ones that seem to imply underage titillation\pedophile tendencies. As that would cater explicatively to a certain audience which is vile.

Other game like this for instance isn’t aimed at future rioters or criminals but is more in the same vain as a disaster movie and a cartoon one at that.

Funny, I find a few RPS readers to be extremely sensitive over certain things that I find is really of little consequence or harm.

Yeah, that’ll be one of those annoying ‘other people have opinions that are different from mine’ revelations. Best thing to do is hang out solely with people who have exactly the same opinions as you so that you can live a life free of challenge or consideration.

Yeah, that’ll be one of those annoying ‘other people have opinions that are different from mine’ revelations. Best thing to do is hang out solely with people who have exactly the same opinions as you so that you can live a life free of challenge or consideration.

See? It works for *everything* you say, wodin!
It even works as a recursive reply to itself.

I like the simulation aspect of this project, but I think you could do much better instead of just making a game about destroying something just for the sake of destruction. The art style is lovely, but at the same time not more than a gimmick.

I really “like” violence in games, if it makes me THINK about something. I just have no fun in killing computer pixels and making their life miserable, just to reach a higher score. But if other people have fun with it, okay, it’s just not for me.

I see you point..thats why I mentioned having a more sim city aspect..but having bank robberies and the sweenyFlying Squad and having fund a decent fire brigade and make sure their kitted out etc..You could real expand the law and order aspect.. I can picture mad car chases…but you could then have all manner of disasters come along some minor some major..but the world reacts based on how you designed it and where you put the funds and also you could have a chose of different heads of departments who the effect how well the particular force be it police of fire brigade or balance service responds..I’d do like th sound of going the policecriminaldisaster way of things and then watch the stories unfold based on you previous decisions..Maybe your gung ho Flying squad boss caused a fire fight and shot an unarmed criminal which then caused a ruckus in the slum area which the could escalate etc etc..or you watch a bank robbery and the police go into action..do they get there in time..does it turn into a shoot out..or a police chase or do they get away…does car crash and cause a pile up that leads to a major fire that the fire brigade struggle to control…or would be cool..but not sure if it could be done..A game that slowly turns into chaos sometimes slowly sometime quickly but always tells a new story. Think the original GTA but a sim life version..using this engine.

This just makes me want to see if I can build the perfect surveillance society where crimethink, let alone actual crime, is impossible. Where riots simply cannot get hold. Armed police on every corner; a camera tower on every street. A glorious paradise of safety for the law-abiding citizen.

Also I love the graphical style, even if the people and rain currently look a bit odd and out-of-place.

You’ve got to admit there are some interesting conflicting factors in playing this from the police side, gamewise. Public opinion depends on you being effective, but not visibly brutal, so you’ve got to balance yourself on the scale of strong words from bobbies to batons, tazers, tear gas, water cannons, and MP5s. Funding depends on crime being a problem, but you risk serious shake-up restructuring you out of power if it gets out of hand. Depending how much you want to handwave away which part of the power structure you’re supposed to actually be, there’s fudging the crime rate by not only fighting it, but by criminalising and decriminalising grey-area topics. Make the gameplay objective the perpetuation and growth of self, and I bet you can get the player seizing on every violently criminal tragedy to introduce new draconian police powers, in a genuine mix of megalomania and fear of beng inadaquately in control and inadquately prepared to prevent an upsurge of similar copy-cat acts.

I reckon there’s enough trade-off problem-space to make a pretty good management sim, there.

Seriously, it’s pretty dark subject matter, but as a game mechanic it sounds fascinating. What if game let you stage a crime in a public place as an excuse for increasing police force/control? Or like the opening to dishonored where they frame him for her murder and use it as an excuse to seize more power? WHAT IF YOU COULD DO THAT? And the bosses would be Gordon Freeman-style “people’s heroes” that you have to squash before they get too much momentum. The balance between seizing more control and keeping people ok with the massive expansions of the police-state? There seriously is mountains of potential in this.

People’s heroes is a fun idea. =) Super fast, strong, skilled, sneaky dudes who just keep popping up and causing trouble. I would deal with them by placing men in groups of two or three near explosive barrels, to lure the hero into my trap.

(If you think that maybe the evil overlord is dealing not just with you, but with a few dozen people’s heroes all over the empire, it makes slightly more sense why he cannot spare his crack troops to crush you at the beginning of every single player game).

Ah, yes, one of those management sims that players would find actively disquieting because of what it says about both them and powerful people in general.

We need more of those. Shame most developers – even indies, oddly – seem to view such games as off-limits because the player might not have a good time while playing them. There are exceptions, and I salute them for their bravery, but they’re rarely engaging, and if a game doesn’t engage the player, it’s just not that good.

Such games should be made, IMHO, because it’s intellectually lazy to call a horrible person a monster. They become an unknowable Other, when they’re really human beings who did monstrous things.

I certainly love disaster simulating, but this so far sounds a little light to be really satisfying, as well as being completely aimless. I definitely think detailed aftermath statistics would be good, and I don’t agree with the idea of an eternal loop state – the game should have a definitive end. As much as I like the idea of dinosaurs shitting bankers. I’m inclined to suggest that that end should be either when everything collapses or when the riot (or zombie invasion, or whatever) burns itself out/is put down by the authorities. Honestly, a more interactive and visual version of what Pandemic’s doing seems like a decent gameplay model.

@malkav11
That’s the thing. It’s trivial to put up a finish line and we are completely open to the options. If we had a mode where the game “ended” once every building was destroyed, that’s a straight forward thing to put in place. From there you could have leader-boards comparing time taken to get there. Or Activists required. Or people not dead. etc

As long as the little town is solid and dynamic, we are open to all kinds of experimental funk. It’s a toy and like the best toys, the rules are fluid and require imagination. Having the world never ending is something that’s gonna happen if you want it too. If you want to play a speed destruction run, that’s cool too. If enough people like the speed destruction run, we’ll get leaderboards up and running so you can compete.

Yes. I’m one of the devs, in case that isn’t obvious. I’m the “Michael” model. MY above views are my personal opinions. We argue a lot about this stuff… The game is born of anarchy!

Excuse me, Mister Developer, but I was wondering if you had a price point in mind for this? It certainly is lovely in both visual style and thematic charm, but when it comes to plonking down cash, well, I already own a snowglobe.

Wonder what game engine they’re using? Certainly looks nice for a six-person studio. The depth-of-field blurring definitely reminds me of SimCity, and seeing the paper Mini Cooper warmed the cockles of my heart.

But the lavish description of complex interactions they want to create seems quite…ambitious. I’m happy to be proved wrong, but this is sounding a bit like something Molyneux would pitch. I’m looking forward to seeing more!

p.s. — the Wild Worlds logo on the end of the trailer reminds me a bit of the MasterCard logo; wonder if this was intentional subversion?